Being John Malkovich (1999)

F

Note: This article contains sexually
explicit language that I could not avoid if I were to write a
clear moral critique of this film. If you do not wish to read
such material, I can confidently tell you from the outset that
you will not under any circumstances wish to see this film. Other
readers are free to continue reading and decide for
themselves.

SDG

Being John Malkovich is a film of
startling originality and creativity, a work of continual
invention and hauntingly vivid imagery. First-time director Spike
Jonze, who starred as the fourth of Three Kings in that
equally bold and confident masterpiece, has here crafted a film
of surreal whimsy and nightmarish black comedy that evokes the
best of Terry Gilliam.

It is also a profoundly perverse and subversive film that
smears into oblivion ordinarily clear boundaries of behavior, to
the point that I hardly know how to classify the specific type of
illicit sexual activity occurring on the screen — hence the
hesitant language in the advisory notice above.

In a sense, nothing happens that is not consensual,
heterosexual, casual fornication, since there is always one
willing man and one willing woman and neither is married. But in
this case the man is John Horatio Malkovich (played by actor John
Gavin Malkovich — the variant middle name presumably signifying
that Malkovich the character is not identical to Malkovich the
actor; rather as the Dante who appears as a character in The
Divine Comedy is not identical to the real Dante writing the
Comedy).

And John Horatio has an odd Achilles’ heel, a vulnerability
not in fact in his heel but in his head: Somewhere in Manhattan
there is a certain room on a certain floor in a certain building,
and in this room there is a portal, and anyone who passes through
the portal enters for a quarter of an hour into Malkovich’s mind,
seeing, hearing, feeling whatever Malkovich experiences; an
invasion of which Malkovich himself remains, at least initially,
completely unaware.

So, when the individual inside Malkovich’s head is a married
man, and Malkovich has intercourse with a woman, the man in
Malkovich’s head also, in a sense, has intercourse with the
woman, and thus in a sense commits adultery. And when the
individual inside his head is a woman, the woman inside his head
also in a sense has intercourse with the other woman, an act that
is not precisely lesbianism nor precisely transsexualism, but a
queer evocation of both under heterosexual appearances. (Both
transsexualism and lesbianism figure explicitly in the
consequences of this act: The woman inside Malkovich [Cameron
Diaz] is so transformed by the experience that at first she wants
to become a man. Later, however, after Diaz gets Keener pregnant
using Malkovich’s body, the two women end up together, in their
own proper bodies and genders and by implication in an "ordinary"
lesbian relationship, raising "their" child together.)

And when Keener is with Malkovich and doesn’t know about the
individual inside Malkovich’s head (or, more complicated still,
when she does know there’s someone there, but thinks it’s
someone other than who it really is), this seems to
constitute a form of violation, almost a kind of rape; or at
least of impersonation, which is presumably a form of rape. Also
in at least one of these bizarre incidents (the first), Keener
does know that Diaz is in there, but Diaz doesn’t
know that Keener knows, and furthermore Diaz hadn’t
anticipated that Malkovich would be having sex with anyone when
she climbed into his head, and thus finds herself having sex
unexpectedly; though not, as it happens, against her will. So
this also seems a kind of violation of Diaz by Keener, even if
one to which she doesn’t object.

Of course, Diaz is herself, in a way, violating Malkovich
himself, simply by entering into him without his knowledge or
consent. This is especially evident from the way Diaz, intrigued
by the whole concept of the portal, has mused at length on the
significance of a man’s mind having a passage or tract into
itself, like a woman’s body. "He has a vagina," she murmurs
happily. "I like that." The prospect of unilaterally electing to
enter Malkovich’s vagina apparently not troubling her, she does
so, and, after her first encounter with Keenan, becomes equally
fascinated with the fact that she herself for that short time
also possessed male anatomy — a fact that leads her to speak,
more than once and using a cruder term, of "her" penis. A woman
with a penis entering the vagina of a man… (The portal
scene also has obvious birth-tract overtones, a fact the film
doesn’t neglect to exploit.)

Five paragraphs so far about this film, all simply to try to
convey what happens when the characters have sex. Is there
nothing in the film but sex and gender politics? Well, yes,
there’s also some stuff about fame, success, identity,
manipulation, immortality, voyeurism, commercialism, the
subconscious, the celebrity-fan relationship, and just how far
you have to be willing to cut overhead to get affordable office
space in Manhattan.

But sex is a major major theme in the film nonetheless. Be
warned: The following paragraphs contain major spoilers. If you
don’t want to know, skip to the end of the
review.

Being John Malkovich: A sexual synopsis

The film’s main character is not Malkovich
but a puppeteer named Craig (John Cusack, in a performance of
remarkable range) who does street-corner theater, as we see in an
early scene with two marionettes dressed as a monk and a nun,
separated by a convent wall but each engaged in erotic pantomime
gyrations. (An outraged father, noticing what his young daughter
is looking at, punches Craig in the nose, an act I could not
quite endorse but well understood.) Later, when Craig at last
gives in to the requests of his harried wife Lotte (Diaz, cast
against type as a dowdy housewife) to get a real job, and reports
to Floor 7 1/2 of the Lestercorp Building, he
interviews with a garrulously senile old boss whose
inconsequential chatter throbs lyrically with erotic longing.

After getting the job, Craig attempts small talk with a sexy
coworker named Maxine (Keener), who takes every word out of his
mouth as a sexual come-on that she curtly rebuffs. This rejection
pulls Craig’s strings, and he very quickly does want her, but is
unable to engage her on any level (especially when she learns
that he "plays with dolls"), until he stumbles upon the portal
into Malkovich’s head. Craig is agog over the philosophical
implications, but Maxine quickly sees a business opportunity, and
soon people are lining up to pay $200 for their fifteen minutes
of Malkovich (Andy Warhol never saw this coming).

But when Craig’s wife Lotte insists on her own visit to
Malkovich’s head, Maxine goes and finds the actor himself, first
flirting with him and then seducing him, throwing Lotte into
sexual confusion. Soon both Craig and Lotte are coming on to
Maxine, but she has no interest in Craig and is interested in
Lotte only as Malkovich. Stung with jealousy, Craig first
physically forces his wife to arrange a Malkovich rendezvous with
Maxine, then locks her up and goes to keep the date himself.
Later, he seems overcome with remorse over the enormity of what
he has done and how he has betrayed their marriage. But no, it’s
all another trick to get Maxine again: there is no remorse, no
guilt, ever, by anyone in this story of unremitting nastiness,
cruelty, selfishness, rudeness, and antisocial behavior.

Then the story takes another unexpected turn: When Lotte
alerts Maxine that it was Craig, not she, in Malkovich, Maxine is
not repelled but intrigued — the last time she was with
Malkovich, the person inside showed signs of being able to
control Malkovich’s behavior, something hitherto unprecedented.
Impressed as one master manipulator by the work of another,
Maxine decides that there may be something to this playing with
dolls business after all, and dumps Lotte for Craig, who learns
that he is capable of suppressing Malkovich entirely and taking
over his body indefinitely. Soon the world watches as the
somewhat obscure but respected actor John H. Malkovich marries
Maxine (a relationship simultaneously simulating both lawful
conjugal relations and adultery) and embarks upon a daring new
career of puppetry.

All this, and the film has still more major surprises up its
sleeve. Dr. Lester, that senile, sensuous old boss (Orson Bean),
turns out to have a dark secret and a nefarious plan relating to
the portal: he wants Malkovich’s body as a kind of retirement
plan, and in fact his current body was acquired the same way. But
now his plans have been thrown into jeopardy by Craig’s full-time
possession of Malkovich, so Lester threatens to kill Maxine if
Craig doesn’t abandon Malkovich’s body. (This is a bluff,
however, for Maxine is pregnant with Malkovich’s child, who is
apparently to be the next receptacle of the portal and thus
Lester’s next retirement destination. [By this logic, it would
seem that Lester’s current body ought to be that of Malkovich’s
father, but the film doesn’t explore this.])

Despite Craig’s sacrifice on her behalf, Maxine has no further
interest in him. The story averts one supremely bizarre ending
(Maxine staying with her ostensible husband Malkovich, now
inhabited by Dr. Lester) in favor of another: In the end, Maxine
returns to Lotte, who is, she claims, the "father" of her child;
not only Lester but a whole crew of senior citizens are all
jointly "reborn" as Malkovich (here’s where the birth-tract thing
comes in); Lotte and Maxine are raising their child together; and — in a deeply unnerving postscript — Craig pathetically haunts
the mind of the child (who is, you remember, wired to the
portal), simply to be near the two women he loved.

Conclusion

Is this film without merit? Certainly not.
Those three and a half stars above aren’t for show. There is the
astonishing invention of Floor 7 1/2 of the
Lestercorp Building, with its four-foot ceilings, stooped
employees, and elevator access that requires you to hit the
emergency stop between the seventh and eighth floors and pry the
doors open. This set is a whole world with a twisted logic of its
own and a history to match.

Malkovich’s brushes with the public are also very funny. In
one scene a taxi driver recognizes him as "that actor guy," but
can only come up with the name "Mapplethorpe;" and then tells him
he was "all right in that one thing," the one where he played a
jewel thief. Malkovich denies ever playing a jewel thief; but,
after thinking the matter over, the cabbie says confidently, "No,
I’m pretty sure it was you." In another scene, a man approaches
him and offers heartfelt thanks for Malkovich’s meaningful
performance as a "retard," presumably a reference to the actor’s
performance as Lenny in Of Mice and Men. This is the
closest anyone in the film gets to indentifying any of
Malkovich’s actual work; people talk about how respected he is,
but no one knows what he’s been in.

There are also two nightmarish sequences in which characters
descend into Malkovich’s subconscious. The first time it is
Malkovich himself, who descends into his own portal and comes
face-to-face with a side of himself that no one should ever have
to confront this side of Judgment Day: he learns that he sees
everyone in the world in his own image, and the only word he ever
hears or sees is his own last name. Later, Lotte and Maxine fight
their way through a very different region of Malkovich’s
subconscious, in which an insecure little boy sits in a dark
cellar muttering over and over "I’m bad, I’m bad, I’m bad" and
every horrid memory of childhood has taken root and metastasized
into grotesquerie.

This is a visionary and highly imaginative film. But in
turning its sensibilities toward sex, visionary becomes
revisionary, and subversion becomes perversion. The malleable,
plastic vision of human nature in general and of sexuality in
particular, in which gender and relationships shift and merge and
re-form like blobs of goo in a lava lamp, represents a profoundly
anti-human fantasy and an affront to personal dignity. This film
runs roughshod over the first and fundamental truth about human
sexuality: "Male and female He created them… Therefore a
man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and
they become one flesh."